When Sen. Ted Cruz of La Mancha jumped on his trusty steed and charged the windmills, he
explained: “Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy.” He added that accepting
the Affordable Care Act would be like appeasing the Nazis.

Cruz is a smart man, and maybe this is just disingenuous demagoguery. But there’s a scarier
possibility: After spending too much time in the Republican echo chamber, he may believe what he
says.

In the 1990s, as conservative talk radio spread across America, liberals felt victimized. But,
in retrospect, the rise of talk radio, Fox News Channel and right-wing websites may have done
greatest harm to conservatives themselves.

The right-wing echo chamber breeds extremism, intimidates moderates and misleads people into
thinking that their worldview is broadly shared.

That’s the information bubble that tugs the entire Republican Party to the right and that
transforms people like Cruz into crusading Don Quixotes. And that’s why Republicans may lead us
over a financial cliff, even though polling suggests that voters would blame them.

In one extreme case, the right-wing media bubble may even have been lethal for its inhabitants.
That was the 2009-10 swine-flu epidemic, which killed up to 18,000 Americans, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When the flu first emerged, Republicans and Democrats responded with the same level of concern.
That makes sense. Why should political differences affect health judgments?

But then conservative commentators began to denounce the Obama administration’s call for people
to get vaccinated. Glenn Beck said he would do “the exact opposite” of what the federal government
recommended. Rush Limbaugh said: If “you have some idiot government official demanding, telling me
I must take this vaccine, I’ll never take it.”

The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely to say that they would get the
life-saving vaccinations, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Matthew A. Baum, the Harvard scholar who wrote
the journal article, told me that he couldn’t calculate how many of the total flu deaths were
attributable to conservatives putting too much faith in their pundits.

Of course, the left has long had its own version of this problem, as well. After Richard Nixon’s
1972 landslide re-election, Pauline Kael of
The New Yorker famously said she was mystified because she knew only one person who had
voted for Nixon. MSNBC and The Huffington Post have become cocoons for liberals, just as Fox News
is for conservatives.

Both Fox News and MSNBC rely more on punditry than on reporting, and I remember once early in
the Iraq war when I was with U.S. troops watching on Fox News Channel as blowhards in the studio
claimed that Iraqis were welcoming us with flowers. We watched, stunned, wondering what war the
network was covering.

Research suggests that the echo-chamber effect is disproportionately a problem on the right,
leading inhabitants to perceive a warped reality. Many Republicans were shocked that Mitt Romney
was defeated last fall because they had been assured that he would win. And a Pew survey last year
found that the proportion of conservative Republicans who believe that President Barack Obama is a
Muslim has doubled since 2008 to 34 percent.

The right-wing bubble makes it harder to elect Republican presidents, by enforcing an
ideological purity in primaries that weakens candidates in general elections. Too much time in the
bubble also leaves some Republican politicians saying things that just sound nutty to independents.
For example, some Republican members of the House are taking seriously the conspiracy notion that
the government is buying up bullets so that private gunowners won’t be able to defend
themselves.

Yet when Don Cruz of La Mancha and other extremists threaten a cataclysm that could damage the
national economy, we have self-inflicted not just harm, but also a threat to the national
well-being.

I often cover dysfunctional, strife-ridden countries, from Congo to Syria, Sudan to Afghanistan.
This fall, alas, it looks as if I won’t have to travel so far.